Climate Change

Rescheduled to November 16 / In her new book 'Free Gifts,' Alyssa Battistoni explores capitalism’s persistent failure to place value on nature. But the key question is not the moral issue of why some kinds of nature shouldn’t be commodified, but the economic puzzle of why they haven’t been. Recovering and reinterpreting classical economists' idea of "free gifts of nature," Battistoni builds on Karl Marx’s critique of political economy to show how capitalism fundamentally treats nature as free for the taking.